The world moves faster than ever and in their pursuit of short term profits, some companies might be missing the bigger picture and forgetting that true partnerships with translation vendors should be based on trust, fairness and loyalty. Overlooking these timeless values might lead these companies to make wrong strategic decisions for the long term.

Companies operating across language borders need to buy translations and software localization services. These language services may be seen as just another expense, with some procurement executives increasingly buying such services and only considering the cost. From their point of view, translations are just another commodity with any translator or translation company being fit to do the job ...

A translation buyer must be aware that correcting a poor translation is difficult and the results are never fully satisfactory. If the translation contains errors that are not discovered until shortly before publication, a project may miss its deadline. Worse still, if the errors are significant and go undetected, the company or brand’s image may suffer.In this post I am going to suggest a few ideas that I think may be of use when selecting a reliable translation provider.

The translation sector is very large and comprises many independent translators, small, local, more or less specialised agencies...

In the translation industry, translation jobs are generally charged per word. While theoretically this is a fair way of paying the translation effort, rate per word in itself can be very misleading.

When a potential customer requests our rate per word, there are a few factors that have an impact on the rate, mainly source language, target language, urgency, translation volume, formatting, and degree of specialization. But besides these factors which are quite clear to everyone, there are some other aspects that are not fully transparent to the client and can be misleading, like comparing pears with apples.

A translation agency acts as a middleman between the translator, who actually does the work, and the client, who pays for the service. In the age of internet and direct communication, middlemen might seem unnecessary because they only increase costs and do not add real value. Since translators can be found easily on internet, it always makes sense for the client to work directly with freelance translators.

Though the previous paragraph might be true in certain types of translation, for example in literary translations where the creation of the target text is a craft that requires using the se...